Tea Partiers: Textbooks Must Be Nicer to Founders

Tennessee Tea Party activists met with lawmakers yesterday to demand the state make a number of changes—including “educating students the truth about America.” What does that grammatically suspect phrase mean? It means that they want textbooks to stop criticizing the founding fathers for their treatment of Native Americans and slaves. “No portrayal of minority experience which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers,” the activists wrote in material distributed to the Commercial Appeal.

There’s been “an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another,” the group’s spokesman said in a news conference, and the group thinks texts should focus on the positive strides the founders made. “It was their progress that we need to look at.” The group is also asking the state to “reject” the federal health care law, and allow the people to elect either the state attorney general or an independent "chief litigator." (More Tea Party stories.)